Well worth your time time to read:

How We Know by Freeman Dyson | The New York Review of Books: "The information flood has also brought enormous benefits to science. The public has a distorted view of science, because children are taught in school that science is a collection of firmly established truths. In fact, science is not a collection of truths. It is a continuing exploration of mysteries. Wherever we go exploring in the world around us, we find mysteries. Our planet is covered by continents and oceans whose origin we cannot explain. Our atmosphere is constantly stirred by poorly understood disturbances that we call weather and climate. The visible matter in the universe is outweighed by a much larger quantity of dark invisible matter that we do not understand at all. The origin of life is a total mystery, and so is the existence of human consciousness. We have no clear idea how the electrical discharges occurring in nerve cells in our brains are connected with our feelings and desires and actions."

Vernier Video Physics for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad on the iTunes App Store: "Vernier Video Physics for iOS brings physics video analysis to iPhone, iPod touch and iPad. Take a video of an object in motion, mark its position frame by frame, and set up the scale using a known distance. Video Physics then draws trajectory, position, and velocity graphs for the object. Share video, graphs and data to facebook, your Photo Library and to your computer running Vernier's Logger Pro software."

I can't tell you what this means to me as a teacher. Wow. We're living in the future, folks.

Couldn't agree more with the tenor or message of this...

Science teacher: Adam Smith and me: "So why do I teach science?"

I need to dust off my old copies of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and make sure they are on display in my (self-imposed-minimalist) classroom.

I thought November 9 (Sagan's Birthday) was always Carl Sagan Day? Evidently it's today:

Carl Sagan Day: To celebrate his legacy at the 76th anniversary of his birth (November 9, 1934), and to increase public involvement in the excitement of astronomy and space exploration, a local coalition of science and reason-based organizations announces the SECOND ANNUAL CARL SAGAN DAY, NOV. 6 2010.

I'll be celebrating with some Apple Pie (because "if you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe") on Tuesday the 9th with my 8th graders.

These are all my tweets. I stand by them:

Science teacher: Twitter is creepy: "We wield phenomenal power over students. We forget this at our (and our students') peril."

Caring is creepy. So is teaching, really. Life is pretty creepy if you think about it. Maybe I should stop being offended when Michael calls me creepy. Or maybe "...this is way beyond my remote concern of being condescending." Rock on.

My first summer camp at Spartanburg Day School starts on Monday and I've lovingly titled it "Griffin Mythbusters." The setup goes something like this. The ~20 5-9th Graders that have signed up and I will start Monday by hammering out a good urban myth to examine. It might be something covered on the TV show or it might be something completely local (which is what I hope). I'm giving them the choice, though. Then we'll split up into a couple of build teams, a research team, and a supplies team. They'll rotate through the teams throughout the week as we work on models to explore the myth. By Friday, I'm hoping that we'll have successfully nailed down the best way to do a major demonstration to either confirm or bust the myth in question. We'll be live blogging (and reflective blogging) the whole thing here:

Griffin Mythbusters - Spartanburg Day School Summer 2010: "We're busting (or confirming) urban myths using science at Spartanburg Day School."

I chose to use Posterous as the platform for our site since it allows for easy collaboration, team members can post quickly via their mobiles on the go and they can send things out to their Facebook or Twitter profiles if they'd like to share what they're up to with their friends. Of course the main reason to do all of this is to plant the seed of scientific method into their heads without making them memorize a chart. And to blow things up. I'm excited. Grab the Griffin Mythbusters feed if you'd like to follow along and see how things go on our one week adventure.

I finally broke down and bought a reel mower today. I mowed half of our property. It was fantastic. Then I ate a pear from one of the fruit trees on our property. It wasn't quite ready, but it was still fantastic. I think today will make me a better science teacher.

From Discovery Education (warning, it's a PDF). It's taken me 31 years and I can barely tell the difference between the two if at all. The trick is to help students realize that science wasn't (magically) discovered in the 1600's by Galileo (as this guide would have us to "believe"). Nor has science progressed on an upward curve to its current level of awesomeness. Like the rest of humanity, science has had its ups and downs but the myth of a progression of enlightenment is hubric and dangerous. That's not to say that we should inject science with flights of philosophical fancy. However, Athens still has a great deal to do with Jerusalem and CERN has a great deal to learn from both. Otherwise, you end up like them.

I wish this was my classroom. I taught my daughter more about rock geology today than I could ever have taught her under the glare of noble gas light in a square (or rectangle) room. We even touched on biology in a discussion of bivalves (her new necklace) and dead dragonfly's. Then as the summer afternoon thunder came, we discussed barometric pressure, the speed of sound waves, mediums and atmospheric science. As a wise science teacher once said, we can't teach science under fluorescent lights. Heartstrings pull.

I'm terribly excited to head to the local bookstore to pick up Sam Kean's new book on the periodic table today. For some strange reason, I find the periodic table a fascinating symbol of humanity in our continuing attempts to understand the universe around us. There is much more than just chemistry wrapped up in its columns and rows. Maybe I've read too much Oliver Sacks. Nevertheless, I try to convey that sense of awe to my students. You can read more about Kean's book on this NPR segment about The Disappearing Spoon. Good stuff.